The Signs Point to Storm

THE SIGNS POINT TO STORM

By Susanna Buehme-Kuby [This article published in Ossietzky 2/2016 is translated from the German on the Internet, http://sopos.org.]

In a 300-page anthology, 25 expert authors discuss the complex theme from different perspectives that since the summer of 2015 has dominated the German public like no other: refugees, migrants, immigrants from the Middle East and remote Africa who are now also crossing German borders. That the escape movement arrives in Germany is new, as Anja Reschke explains. The country “is torn out of its paralysis.” She quotes the 2015 Shell Youth study that reveals how youths are more intensely interested in politics than earlier and want to actively and jointly form their future with the new refugees. But what is the foundation? On what “values” should European society be based in the future? This book will enlighten and present an abundance of necessary expert knowledge in view of the “deficient knowledge of the causes and effects of flight.”

Bahman Nirumand remembers the pain of having to leave his home when his political exile began almost 50 years ago. However there are many more “causes of flight” today.

Gabriele Gillen’s survey moves the facts into light that German propaganda sentences like “We cannot save the whole world” cover up. The neighboring states from Turkey to Pakistan bear the main burden of the war-caused mass flight in the Middle East! Little Lebanon is in first place with nearly 25 percent refugees. No European state is among the ten main receiver countries. Germany is in 50th place in this statistic after accepted 18.5 million refugees in the last ten years. This imbalance is decried by the UN Refugee Commissioner Antonio Guterpes as proof for “the hostility to foreigners of industrial states.” Gillen points to “our responsibility for the destructive inheritance of colonialism and imperialism,” for the “wars arising from this inheritance, the national, European and worldwide inequalities.” “The military interventions of the West perpetrated in the name of democracy and human rights advance the disintegration processes and the expansion of law-free areas not only in the Middle East.” At least 60 million people are roaming about in the world in search of safe shelter and work possibilities. Most would like to remain in their culture or return home as soon as possible… Only 14 percent try to enter the North under usually inhuman conditions. Far more escape from poverty, hunger and climate upheavals without protection of the Geneva Refugee Convention. “Resentment against so-called poverty- or economic refugees is fomented” – from the Bild newspaper, the CDU/CSU to the German chancellor who distinguishes between “refugees deserving protection and refugees not deserving protection.” Finally, Gillen identifies the basic problematic of the tragedy: “gigantic masses of superfluous workers, more than a billion, who are not needed worldwide in the exploitation cycle of capital. The tendency is increasing.

Daniela Dahn’s reflections also start from this basic problem. With graphic examples, she names the grand delusion about the present-day consequences of turbo-capitalism and neocolonialism with which the big media befuddle the majority of citizens. She emphasizes how military alliances with the US are hardly in the interest of Europe’s peoples – starting from the falsified justifications for the US wars of aggression after the downfall of the Soviet Union 25 years ago. On Africa’s catastrophic situation where three-quarters of the population live in poverty and will migrate increasingly in the future despite their wealth in mineral resources, she says: “There are causes of flight that are so grave that they become irreparable for generations.” The West must decide “how it will deal with the refugees that it has largely caused.” “The Western order could implode if it is not capable of learning in the future. What powers could fill the vacuum?” Dahn’s conclusion is that one thing must be learned: sharing. The super-rich with over $100 trillion could “give ten percent for the stability of the world structure, a sum that amounts to the annual economic output of the EU. “Solidarity community or barbarism” is a variant of “socialism or barbarism” (Marx) adjusted to contemporary usage.

Eight detailed articles follow the dangerous “escape routes” and show that the past measures to “limit migration” defined as a goal in the 2004 immigration law follow security policy considerations. However they miss their goal. Organizations like Frontex are ruthless and inhuman and provoke the question “Where does Europe’s fortress begin?” (Gillen). Their answer is: “The fortress begins among us -in our heads.” In seven further articles, there is a discussion about the tension and division between “Germany and Europe,” between the “satiated and the hungry” (Herfried Munkler), to the “People’s Front from the right” (Patrick Gensing). Thomas Straubhaar stresses the mainly positive economic aspects of migrations from which Germany (or rather its economy) profited in the past. “From an economic perspective, there should be no artificial immigration obstacles.” However praxis looks different than the theory.

Here the newcomers appear as rivals for the fringe benefits. Extreme solutions would break today’s “legal and economic conditions.” Moreover “national asylum policy is condemned to fail.” A “socialization of migration policy” in Europe is necessary!

Heribert Prantl called the Dublin regime keeping refugees away from Germany since 1990 “un-solidarity and devilish/hellism” burdening Southern Europe above all that has de facto broken down. The demand for a solidarity European (migration-) policy raised by him – without which Europe cannot survive as a Union – appears necessary and utopian given today’s conditions.

The signs point strongly to storm. This becomes clearer when you put the book down.

Anja Reschke (ed): “Und das ist erst der Anfang. Deutschland und die Fluchtlinge,” Rowohlt Polaris, 333 pages, 12.99 E